Sniffing Atmospheres : Observations on Olfactory Being-In-The-World

The paper considers the phenomenological and atmospherological significance of smell perception as a form of felt-bodily attunement and resonance. Exerting a strong but underestimated influence over the way people feel, smell, in fact, needs to be addressed as an atmosphere, that is as an outside and spatial feeling, as well as its more subjective effect (Stimmung). Starting from some groundbreaking approaches (Tellenbach, Schmitz and Böhme), I argue that there are many reasons that justify the atmospheric central role of smell. Thanks to features like invasiveness and phylo-and ontogenetic priority, pathic and aerial stuff, mnemic-evocative power and spatial diffusiveness, intermodality, etc., an olfactory phenomenology becomes the model for better explaining a more general atmospheric affective agency of the expressive qualities inhabiting the external world.